Sandy Aung appreciates the increasing gender diversity in STEM. It has helped put her on track in her career in STEM.
International Women's Day 2023 is all about Cracking the Code: Innovation for a Gender Equal Future. As part of our celebration of International Women's Day, LJ Future Skills is sharing stories of amazing women in the STEM industry who are letting their passion for STEM drive their career.
Sandy Aung, Network Engineer at Telstra
With a background in B Mechatronics Engineering and M Biomedical Engineering, Sandy is embarking on her first career while adapting to flexible working brought about by COVID-19. Even though the "work from anywhere" policy gives her the freedom to work from almost any country in the world, it was still challenging for her to start her career in a remote working environment because it was difficult to find the right peers to ask questions.
Increase in gender diversity
What Sandy has noticed is an increase in gender diversity in engineering and related fields. She now works with women who excel in technical roles as well as leadership roles in the industry. This is important for Sandy, because as someone who is just starting out in her career (she has been working for two years), she is thankful to have role models who have showed her the multiple career avenues available to her. In recent years, there has been an influx of female technical graduates like Sandy, and that means she has an increasing group of people she can relate to, and discuss the growing pains of starting a career in this industry.
Exposure is key
Sandy's love affair with STEM started in high school. It was clear then to her that she liked Maths and working in a team with her peers. She did have her doubts about her abilities in STEM and whether that was the right career for her, but luckily for her, she met a wide range of other women in university she could relate and aspire to be like. She learnt that there are many different jobs in the engineering field which require a wide range of skills. This includes coding, IP networking, communication and teamwork. It's natural to be stronger in some skills than others, and there is a wide variety of careers to suit each person's unique skillset.
"Get as much hands-on exposure as you an to a variety of industries. At university, I took on mentoring opportunities and did site visits at biomedical, energy banking and infrastructure corporations. As a student, you have the freedom to gain insight into how the world works. Learning about the different ways I can make my contribution to society as an engineer helped me gain confidence and got me really excited to start my career."
Leveraging technology
Over the last five years in the telecommunications industry, there has been a large adaption of IT technologies such as Cloud and Cybersecurity to allow the 4G and 5G Mobile Network to become more dynamic and efficient. This allows companies to change the network faster to suit changing customer demands and increase the efficiency of maintenance and lifecycle work.
As a result, the skills required to be a Network Engineer has vastly changed to keep up with the adaption of new technologies. It is becoming common practice to use coding languages like Python to automate traditional network engineering tasks like packet processing or creating IP addresses. Languages like HTML and CSS and query languages like SQL are used to enable visibility of the performance of the 4G and 5G network. Sandy says there is now such a wide variety of skills she can develop as a Network Engineer and it is rewarding to be able to learn while providing an essential service for millions of Australians.
STEM opens up a whole world of opportunities for everyone, and it certainly has given Sandy an important start to her career.
If you are passionate about STEM and want to take it further for your studies, career or simply for your own personal interests, you can find tutors for a variety STEM subjects here.
About LJ Future Skills
LJ Future Skills is inspired to bring you a trusted STEM platform connecting learners with the best STEM experts quickly. This is Australia's online STEM learning marketplace, connecting children and their parents, adults or pensioners with trusted tutors.
Tutors are available face to face or online.
Whatever your age, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, MATHEMATICS (STEM) and other subjects are key to your academic, career and life successes and a sense of achievement.
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